A two-day KM conference: KM Singapore 2011 ended on 2 September. The conference was held at the Intercontinental Hotel, Bugis, Singapore. The organiser, iKMS (information and Knowledge Management Society of Singapore), successfully invited three rock-stars of the KM world, to speak in the conference:

• Gary Klein, PhD
• James Robertson (Step Two Design)
• Patrick Lambe (Straits Knowledge)

I admire Gary Klein’s work on decision-making. I like James Robertson’s view on the intranet. And I think Patrick Lambe is one of the most talented taxonomists in the KM world. (There are other speakers, of course. But I’m not familiar with their work – and thus I can’t comment on them).

I have only one regret: I missed the highly-anticipated Klein’s, Robertson’s and Lambe’s talk. (It’s not intentional. I swear)

Thankfully, iKMS is far-sighted. They know that there will be many busy professionals like me (In fact, they know me. They know that I came late. Gosh, I hope they don’t ban me). So, they blog about the talks. Check it out in KM Singapore website.

I was very busy at work. I’m not making excuses here. I’m helping the organisation that I worked for, to roll-out new sharepoint 2010-based intranet. And if you have experienced this before, you’d know that it’s a gigantic task!

Whatever task that you ask your colleagues to do, they won’t do it until the very last minute. It’s not that they are a bunch of evil, blood-sucking vampires. They will prioritise their work over and above intranet. And if you think you could convince them through reasoning, i.e. telling them that intranet is part of their work, asking them to think long term, etc - you are dead wrong (they simply couldn’t care less).

okay, my rant ends here (thanks for listening. Pheew, I need to let some air out).

Luckily, after the conference was over, I met and conversed with Bill Proudfit (twitter: @baoman | blog) – a KMer from Hong Kong. He is a highly respected record-and-content management professional with decades of experience.

Bill Proudfit (left) and me (right)

He gave me some valuable tips and ideas on managing contents/records in the intranet. Here are some takeaways that I got from our conversation:

• Don’t try to educate people on the difference between documents and records. He said, “differentiating between records and documents is a crazy concept.” I agree with Bill. At some point, people wonder when they should promote documents to become records. And they wouldn’t bother doing it.
• All contents – including pages in your intranet – should be part of record management system. People often missed out this. Contents on pages can become obsolete too. That’s when you should archive the pages.
• Get people to validate the freshness of contents in the intranet. This means you need to have a robust publishing workflow, that could notify people when they should validate the contents. A good timeframe would be twelve months from the publishing date.
• Limit the use of fonts in your documents/records in the intranet. You wouldn’t want your intranet to contain various types of fonts in various sizes, would you? Your contents will look unorganised, unprofessional and unfocused.
• Almost all contents in the old intranet are junk contents. This is the main reason why content migration is so darn difficult. If most contents in the old intranet are junk, then who is going to clean and rewrite the contents? The content owners wouldn’t bother. Besides, they may not know, how to write online contents. My advise is: Hire professional content writers to do the grunt work. Don’t waste your money to train the content-owners on content writing. It is not a skill that anyone can easily pick up.

Any thoughts/ideas on record/content management? Let me know. And if you attend the KM Singapore, or follow the event on twitter, share your experience. What did you learn? How did you find the event?